Subject: A letter that I wrote to AOL
   Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 22:23:30 -0800
   From: Lord Xarph

This was sent via AOL's web-form, but I figure it must be archived for preservation as An Oldskool Xarph Rant.

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I would just like to take this opportunity to express my opinions of your software as a computer builder.

To put it simply, It sucks.

It sucks hard.

It sucks rocks.

It could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

It sucks about as well as a leaf blower.

It sucks so hard that I replaced my Dirt Devil with it.

It sucks more than a black hole.

It sucks more than the box of suckers at the five and dime store.

It sucks more than the last breath of the person a Mafia hit man attached bricks to the feet of and threw into the deepest part of a very deep lake.

I'm sure you get the idea.

AOL 5.0 simply destroys almost any computer it comes in contact.  Even a brand new one that I had just built and had nothing else on it after a clean format and 98 install.  I won't bore you with the details, but it took about 8 straight hours to get AOL 5.0 to function with the modem in this machine.

I have one simple question to ask your software designers: What kind of drugs are you taking, and how much for an 8-ball?

Ever since Windows 95, modem init strings, custom drivers, and modem detection have been obsolete.  There is no reason WHATSOEVER for you to use your own modem drivers and communicate with the modem hardware directly with your software.  It's unstable, it's stupid, it hinders YOUR software tremendously, and it leads people like us to invent new swear words to use on morons like you.

Why can't you use TAPI like any SANE company?  You know what pissed me off the most since AOL 5.0 wouldn't work?  AOL 4.0, because it insists on using its own damn drivers, only recognized modems on ports up through COM4.  The LT Winmodem will only install on COM5.  So I grudgingly went back to getting AOL 5.0 working. After fixing all the half-assed brain surgery it did on the OS, I realized you ALMOST fixed your biggest software problem: you now support up through COM15.  Well how grand all that is!  WHAT IF THE MODEM ISN'T EVEN ON A SERIAL PORT?!  USB modems are becoming more and more common, and your software is too brain dead to accept this!

I won't go into how your holier-than-thou, king-of-the-Internet attitude pisses me off.  Right now I'm kicking myself for wasting time writing this.  I guess it's just that the plumber is currently fixing the water, so I have nothing better to do, otherwise I would probably be doing something more constructive, like using the toilet.

Please throw out your piece of shit software.  Please rewrite it from the ground up, using standard Windows calls.  Some of those may be slow or do things differently than you like, but they're STANDARD, and more often than not, THEY WORK.

I could also get into your horrible philosophy of claiming everything on the computer as your own, but I'm not going there.  Just read the 100+ negative comments on the Slashdot article.

Have a nice day.  I didn't.

-Lx?
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Lord Xarph
Coming soon to the deepest part of a very deep lake near you!